Jan-Erik Rediger

Leif Rothbrust

Ola Gasidlo

Carsten Friedrich

Shelly Coen

Hendrik Mittrop

Will the Real Technologists Please Stand Up

How often have you been engaged in conversation with co-workers and one of your colleagues was referred to as “not technical”? How often have you used this phrase yourself when talking about other folks in your industry who were not software developers or engineers of another type? And have you ever really considered what your criteria were when applying this label to them?

In this talk, Leslie Hawthorn will argue that this particular phrase has outlived its usefulness in the technology industry. Rather than providing any kind of useful baseline for understanding the skill sets of our colleagues, this binary simply serves as a mental shortcut for our own inherent biases that someone is less capable as we perceive ourselves to be. In addition to the very real chance that this mental shortcut means we’re thinking – and spreading – inaccurate information, it also creates a false dichotomy regarding what each of us might be capable of achieving.

Attendees will leave this talk with a better idea of how to create an environment that values contributions from every single one of their colleagues and to foster each of their teammates continued successes.

Leslie Hawthorn

An internationally known community manager, speaker and author, Leslie Hawthorn has spent the past decade creating, cultivating and enabling open source communities. She created the world’s first initiative to involve pre-university students in open source software development, launched Google’s #2 Developer Blog, received an O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2010 and gave a few great talks on many things open source. She's a recent emigre to Europe and lives with her two cats and partner in Amsterdam.

How you can fix your community in one day

This talk will teach you a magic trick.

It will show you how to stop our communities from breaking apart. Studies have shown that half the women who enter the technology field will, over time, leave. HALF! What’s happening? How did we get here? What can we do?

In my talk I will show you how we can fix the diversity problem, and why we should care. I'll tell you a true story about role models, broken stereotypes - and cat gifs. How to build community-driven initiatives that change our world.

And the best part is: Everyone can do it. In one day.

Anika Lindtner

Anika Lindtner was born and raised in Berlin. Since July 2013 she works at Travis CI and runs the Travis Foundation, aiming to make Open Source even better. She manages Rails Girls Summer of Code - a three months scholarship program in Open Source - and helps over 30 women each year to change their lives.

Anika once was a poetry slam artist, a teacher and worked at an ad agency. She can also draw monsters, knit hats with pom poms and likes urban gardening.

Master of Ceremonies

Kevin Lorenz

Front end developer at @hitfoxgroup and passionate about web typography, design and teaching. Co-organiser of @cssconfeu, @cssclasses and proud member of @hoodiehq. Likes dogs and enjoys writing code (wanted to write “cheese", but, hey this is a tech conf).

Build Newbies, Ship a Better Tech Community

Not happy with the face of your local tech scene? The fastest way to shape your local community is to teach or support enthusiastic newbies. While we’ll look at some of the great mentorship and teaching programs that are available now, you don’t have to limit yourself to existing programs to start helping out. We’ll look at field tested routes to support new programmers that fit a range of different commitment levels. With enough of us helping out, we can change the face of our industry, as well as our local tech communities.

Jessica Rose

Jessica Rose is a self taught technologist from the US who has happily landed in the UK. She's passionate about open access to technical education, tools and structures. She's the founder of Open Code and co-founded Trans*Code. She wants you to tell her about the amazing things you're working on. Blogs infrequently at closetoclever.com

Evolutionary Algorithms 101

The development of evolutionary algorithms is heavily inspired by the processes that are involved in natural evolution. This talk is about the basics of evolutionary algorithms: What is an evolutionary algorithm, what to do with it, when to apply it and what kind of problems are best to be solved by evolutionary algorithms.

The talk contains a lot of visual material with live demonstrations of concrete algorithm implementations.

Manuel Ernst

Manuel has been studying computer science at Georg Simon Ohm University of Applied Sciences in Nuremberg and has been working for the past 7 years as a web developer and technical lead at Musikhaus Thomann e.K. About 14 years ago he started with PHP and since 2012 he is heavily invested in development with node.js both on his working place and in his personal projects. Additionally he is very interested in general CS topics such as compilers, parsers and the theory and implementation of algorithms. He's also playing the drums in a band.

The Full-stack education paradoxon

I am a young lecturer and passionate about teaching. At my university we have a department dedicated to web development. So I am lucky enough to teach something fancy and new every year but we still need to cover basics of computer science in our courses.

As web developers, we are not recognized for our scientific research but we are still the people pushing the web forward every day/week/month of the year. How do we fit into this classic science ecosystem and do we need the system at all?

Initiatives such as OTS, Rails Girls, nodeschool, Codeweek are quite good in getting people into programming and they are also more inclusive than classic institutions such as universities. So why does someone still think about attending a university? Does anyone really need to go there to learn tooling and programming?

In this talk I will take you on a journey on how my department evolved (now 6 years old) and what we did to address at least a dozen of issues we had with our department within this system.

Our goal is to teach people everything they need to become a Full-stack developer someday.

This covers the content of courses, increasing the diversity in classes, getting science and economy together, finding lecturers, translate theoretical computer science topics into something useful for web developers and so on…

You might have to laugh a lot during this talk but be prepared for the sad parts.

Hannes Moser

Hannes is a freelance web developer with a slight faible for web services and API design. The last 13 years, he has worked on browser games, scalable websites, APIs and web applications. He also lectures at the department of „Web-Engineering“ at the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg and has a lovely but crazy dog named Gizmo.

Hack the way to your future home

For several years now there have been a lot of fancy new products allowing you to automate more and more aspects of your home. This ranges from simple radio-controlled sockets to smartphone-controlled lightbulbs and internet-connected weather-stations.

The problem is: All of these products are ridiculously expensive, use proprietary and mostly closed-source technology, are not compatible to one another and are generally not very hacker-friendly.

I want to show you a different approach: All of the above - and a lot more - can be done using just some cheap off-the-shelf components and open technology. You don't even need a degree in electrical engineering for this. And as a bonus you'll be able to control all of your future-home components using nothing but your browser.

When the conference is over you'll want to place your orders and start using what you learned to build your very own internet of things.

Martin Schuhfuß

Having majored in computer-engineering, Martin now works as a freelance JS- and web-developer in Hamburg/Germany. Currently he spends a lot of his spare-time re-learning electrical engineering, working on hardware-hacking projects and looking for ways to make the fields of web-development and hardware-hacking fit together.

You decide whether people are able to use the web

Developers have a huge responsibility to users. Not everyone is able to hear and see your website. People have handicaps. The web is just too important to not care about those people. Imagine a world in your life where you are not able to use the web. It would not be that easy for you to learn something new, to discover great things, to connect with other people. As a developer it is important to remember how much people depend on your way of implementation and how much you can change other people's life.

Jonas Reitmann

Jonas is an aspiring web dev from Hamburg. He is 19, coder by heart and set his goal to make using applications less painful for everyone.

Just queue it!

How many times did you have to get two different API’s to communicate with each other and were left wondering what was the best way to get them talking? XML? JSON? HTTP?

Sound familiar?

You have used service oriented architecture but your projects turned out “speaking different languages” and you’re now faced with the arduous task of being the translator. Life’s too short and #yolo! Although you may have opted for the most appropriate technology, the correct design pattern and the optimal algorithms, if you don’t get your applications talking correctly they will be as good as a plate of spaghetti.

In this presentation I’ll show you the secret many companies have been using for years to be able scale and respond to requests faster. I’ll show you a demo of a life-like application that consumes messages added to a queue and deals with them in a different process.

I will tell you about some of the things you should look for when choosing your messaging system, and what are the things to look for when you start developing your messaging system.

Marcos Placona

Marcos Placona is a developer evangelist at Twilio, a company founded to disrupt telecommunications.

He spends most of his time working with Java and .Net open source projects while equipping and inspiring developers to build killer applications. He's also a great API enthusiast and believes they bring peace to the Software Engineering world.

DevUX: DIY User Experience for Dev Teams

So your team has no UX designer? Your whole company has no UX research or design roles? You do not have a budget to hire a freelancer and even if you had – how on earth would you know who you want to hire and what exactly for?

There is only one solution to that: Do it yourself and get your hands dirty. I'll show you how.

Get Started With Functional Programming

Functional programming is getting a lot of attention and with it comes a lot of confusion.

What is functional programming all about? The answer is not recursion, or currying, or pattern matching. It's not about monads or functors. So, if those concepts sound alien to you, fear not. Those are just design patterns and language features that make it easier to program in a functional way.

You do not have to learn Haskell to write functional code. What differentiates functional code from a non-functional code is not the language it is written in, it's the fact that it's stateless - there are no side-effects.

This talk will explore the concept of state and side-effects a bit further and explains why writing stateless code is becoming more and more important.

Next to that, expect to get some pointers on how to get started with functional programming right away, using a non-functional language, like Python.

Anouk Ruhaak

Anouk started her professional career as an economist, but quickly turned to coding. First as an iOS developer, now as a web developer (with Python and Javascript). She likes to learn for the sake of learning and to help others do the same. When she's not busy coding she helps run Hackership, a learning retreat for developers.

Perfectly Portable: Japanese Mobile Culture Influencing the Front-End

Today's development environment is heavily focussed on "mobile first", but the long-term transition to this framework has been a challenging one. From mobile technology's first forays into web connectivity, user-friendliness and market shaping, Japanese mobile culture has without a doubt had a lasting influence on how we make our development and design decisions.

This talk traces the advent of the mobile first paradigm from its roots in the Japanese mobile revolution, through to the power within the country's changing topography of market end-users, and some of the current issues that face mobile development and design in both Japan and the West. How did Japan's early mobile connectivity set the pace and priorities for not only burgeoning technology, but also the incipient business models that would grow to dominate our tech culture? Has the advent of smartphones really evened the playing field?

Through the lens of cultural psychology, technological history, and market analytics we'll take a closer look at how and why our mobile web is inextricably linked to Japan.

Jennifer Geacone-Cruz

After nearly a decade in Tokyo as a Publishing Infrastructure Designer and editing for Time Out, Harper's Bazaar, and Rolling Stone, Jennifer has been based in Berlin since 2010. She works internationally as a private consultant specialising in startups, team management, psycholinguistics and the Japanese market. When she's not writing poetry and drawing comics, she runs the social media and communications for the open-source project LivingStyleGuide.org and coaches at Open Tech School's CSS Classes.

IoT for the masses

Hardware prototyping with JavaScript, Firefox OS & Rust!

There will be a quick intro to Rust, but more an appetizer than anything else: there will be loads of hands-on demos, though. We will show how even without the slightest electrical engineering and low-level systems-programming knowledge one can prototype real, tangible hardware products via tools provided by hardware like the Tessel (2), Firefox OS phones and maybe even the MozOpenHard open-source FirefoxOS developer board. This might be the very first appearance of Tessel 2 before its official launch and shipping of preorders in early September, and if we can get our dirty paws on some preliminary MozOpenHard open-source FxOS developer boards we will be showcasing that one too (two presenters? two exclusives? hardware hacking? IoT? JS on microcontrollers? The absurd hardware-hacking in this session is just TOO DAMN HIGH!).

Also, the best thing is all code we will write will be easy to understand, human-friendly JavaScript or Rust - so this really is for the masses, anyone can do this! ;)

Dan Callahan

István Szmozsánszky

Dan is a senior engineer on Mozilla's Developer Relations team, where he focuses on Firefox's Developer Tools. Previously, he worked on the Persona project, which attempted to replace passwords with usable, public-key based authentication built on open web standards.

István, better known as Flaki, is a web/js/app-developer from Budapest. Currently freelancing & a Mozilla contributor, he is working with Hungarian Firefox OS developers in developer engagement. Fascinated by what future holds for JS and the web - most of the time talking about Firefox OS, Service Workers, ES201x & JS on embedded hardware - and sometimes caught prophecising JavaScript's world domination.

Code of Conduct

tl;dr Don’t be a Jerk. Be excellent.

All attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers at the OpenTechSchool Conference are required to agree with and act according to the following code of conduct. Organizers will enforce this code throughout the event. We are expecting cooperation from all participants to help ensuring a safe environment for everybody.

Need help? Contact us!

The Quick Version

The OpenTechSchool Conference is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, parties, Twitter, Slack channel and other online media. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference organizers.

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

Sponsors are also subject to the anti-harassment policy. In particular, sponsors should not use sexualized images, activities, or other material. Booth staff (including volunteers) should not use sexualized clothing/uniforms/costumes, or otherwise create a sexualized environment.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the conference organizers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the conference with no refund.

If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of conference staff immediately. Conference staff can be identified by a special conference shirt.

In case you can’t find a staff member or want to contact us via email or phone directly, we are always there for you:

Conference staff will be happy to help participants contact hotel / venue security or local law enforcement, provide escorts, or otherwise assist those experiencing harassment to feel safe for the duration of the conference. We value your attendance.

We expect participants to follow these rules at conference and workshop venues and conference-related social events.